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Smart Fat - Steven Masley, M.D.

The Smartest Way to Live for the Rest of Your Life

THERE IS A WAY OF EATING that will change your life forever.

You will lose weight, and keep it off.

You will feel and look better than ever.

You will get—and stay—healthy.

We’re confident that you’ve never tried to eat like this before, because up until now, the advice on what to eat (and what to avoid) has been difficult to follow. Should you eat low-carb? Low-fat? Paleo? Raw food? Vegan? High-protein? And what about high-fiber?

All of these dietary approaches have their legions of die-hard followers and sworn supporters, from respected medical and science professionals and fitness gurus, to celebrity endorsers touting their before-and-after photos. There are dozens of best-selling books on all these topics, huge amounts of constantly changing information and research, and countless online resources—all of which any of us can access at any time.

A lot of information is out there, which makes for a great deal of confusion, because none of it ever seems to answer your question: What should I eat to lose weight and be healthy?

One of us (Jonny) is a well-known nutritionist and author, a renowned expert on weight loss and wellness who has helped thousands of people reach their goals and get healthy. The other (Steven) is a highly respected physician, nutritionist, author, and patient educator who has devoted much of his career to the study of heart disease and aging, publishing research on these topics in major medical journals.

We independently came to the same conclusion about why so many people fail, over and over again, to lose weight and get healthy. We’ll fill in the rest of this story in the chapters to come, but here’s the point: Despite current popular opinion, fat is a critical component of your health. When we decided to banish fat from our diets, we lost its considerable health benefits.

In fact, eating more fat is the best way to achieve optimal health, longevity, and permanent weight loss.

But, before you get too excited and start loading up on butter and oil, let’s be clear about our message. The high-fat diet we’re recommending will make you healthier and slim for life, but only if you do two things: First, you’ve got to eat lots of what we call smart fat. Second, you have to consume smart fat with the right amounts of fiber and protein, all of which have to be infused with great flavor. As you’ll see, the herbs and spices that season our food not only have major health benefits, they are also the reason why you’ll enjoy eating this way for the rest of your life.

If you’re wondering about what kind of food and how much of it to eat, rest assured that we’ll tell you. But first, let’s talk about fat.

The problem is not the amount of fat in our diets, as we were led to believe for many decades. The problem is that in the name of good health, we mistakenly stripped out of our meals, our kitchens, our restaurants, and our grocery stores the beneficial smart fat—healthy, natural dietary fat from clean, wholesome sources. We replaced it with low-fat (and fat-free) healthy food, which turned out to be anything but healthy. Not only were these foodlike products low in beneficial fats, they were high in processed carbohydrates and sugar, which are very bad for our brains, hearts, and waistlines.

To make matters worse, although we encouraged people to keep some fats on the table, we promoted the wrong kinds of fats. These not-so-smart-fats (go ahead—call them dumb fats) found in prepared and processed foods, and in animal products produced in crowded factories, were precisely the worst fats for health (and for weight loss), but they’ve infiltrated our diet at our own invitation, and they continue to do plenty of damage to this day.

But we now know, after years of research and extensive studies, that healthy dietary fat should not be avoided, that we should, in fact, eat more smart fats. And in the following pages we’re going to show you how to do just that—the right way.

We’re hardly alone in saying that fat is essential for our health and well-being. Since 2010, a spate of studies have come out vindicating fat—even saturated fat—of any direct role in heart disease. But unfortunately, when the it’s okay to eat fat! news jumped from medical journals and into the daily newsfeed, a key question frequently went unanswered: What kind of fat should we incorporate into our diets?

That’s one of the important questions about health that this book answers for you.

We’ve been so concerned with saturated vs. unsaturated and animal vs. vegetable that we’ve lost sight of a far more important distinction: toxic vs. nontoxic fat—or, as we call it, dumb fat vs. smart fat. There are some critical health- and weight-related reasons why this distinction is so crucial, and you’ll be hearing a lot more about them in the chapters that follow.

As you’re about to see, eating a cheeseburger and fries, digging into a plate of fettuccine Alfredo, snacking on a donut, or downing a root beer float is not the take-away from the latest science, but we’ll tell you what is. We’re here to clear up the confusion about what kind of fat to eat, and we’re also here to give you a plan: the Smart Fat Solution.

We’ve found a path to healthy weight loss and a lifetime of wellness, and it’s surprisingly simple to follow. Your challenge is making the decision to take this path, to think a bit differently about your daily diet, and to accept that this new way of eating will transform your life—for the better.

It all comes down to this: If you want the same results, keep doing the same thing you’re doing now. Keep eating the same way, keep living the same way. And you know what? You’re likely to get more of the same. You won’t lose any weight, and you’ll probably gain more. You won’t feel any better, and you won’t have any more energy. But why would you? Eating the way you’ve been eating hasn’t worked so far, so why would it suddenly start producing a healthier, fitter, happier you?

We know, that sounds like tough love—because it is. But without the truth, you can’t do anything to make things better. And we want to show you how to make things better.

You’re about to unlearn what you know about fat, and in the process you’ll find the ideal weight-loss and eating plan that you can follow for a lifetime of vibrant, good health. That’s the Smart Fat Solution. You’ll love how you feel (and how you look), and you’re going to enjoy the flavors of great ingredients that are a pleasure to prepare and eat. And, we predict, you’ll wonder why you never approached food this way in the first place, particularly if you’ve bounced from diet to diet without success.

If you’re really looking for genuine, lasting change in how you look and how you feel—if you want different, better results—then it’s time to do things differently.

In the following pages, you’ll find life-changing information about the vital role that smart fat (nutritional fat) plays in our well-being and longevity. You’ll also find information about what most people incorrectly think of as good fat.

Medically sound, scientifically based—and best of all—user-friendly, the Smart Fat Solution is designed so that you can follow it for the rest of your life. Once you get started, you’ll

Lose unwanted weight and keep it off—and lower your body fat

Feel more energetic and healthier than ever

Manage stress better

Have improved brain function

Dramatically reduce accelerated aging of the body and brain

Prevent and even reverse heart disease and type 2 diabetes

Decrease your risk for developing cancer and other life-threatening illnesses

Lower your susceptibility to nagging chronic conditions

It’s time to get smart about fat—and about everything else that goes into feeling your very best.

Jonny and Steven

PART ONE

Smart Facts About Smart Fat

CHAPTER 1

A High-Fat Diet for a Low-Fat Body

NOT TOO LONG AGO, we both were advocating specific diets for weight loss and wellness. We weren’t just advocates of these plans—we built our professional lives around these two seemingly contradictory nutritional philosophies.

As a practicing nutritionist, Jonny championed the ultra-low-carb Atkins Diet. Famous for its high-protein intake and its jump-start approach to weight loss, Atkins let people lose weight quickly, especially individuals with a lot of excess pounds to shed. But despite the diet’s short-term success, Jonny was troubled by its sometimes restrictive approach, as well as some of the highly processed foods on the diet’s okay to eat list, specifically deli meats, which were liberally allowed.

His instinct was to add more variety, including additional plant sources of fiber such as beans and legumes, which are also great sources of protein, as well as low-sugar fruits like berries. Jonny preferred clean protein instead of the protein from processed, commercial animal products such as feedlot farmed meat and processed cheeses, all of which can be contaminated with additives, hormones, and pesticides. But these modifications didn’t always adhere to the rigid parameters of the Atkins Diet.

Meanwhile, Steven—a physician, nutritionist, trained chef, and medical fellow with several prestigious health organizations—held the position of medical director at the Pritikin Longevity Center where he oversaw many aspects of healthy weight loss, including the center’s ultra-low-fat eating plan. Pritikin participants often struggled with serious conditions like life-threatening heart disease and diabetes. After their stay at Pritikin—with its carefully regulated diet of whole, unprocessed foods high in fiber and complex carbohydrates—people would lose weight quickly, drop several of their medications, and leave the center in excellent shape.

But Steven noticed a troubling pattern: After participants left the controlled surroundings of the Pritikin Center, they regularly returned to their old ways. They just couldn’t stick with the program on their own. Steven, who has spent years researching cardiac health and observing thousands of patients, knew that the Pritikin Diet lacked the healthy proteins and important fats that would have rounded out a truly nutritious and effective diet that a person could follow for life. But just as Jonny found out trying to experiment with the Atkins Diet, any kind of variety or modification, no matter how healthy, wasn’t allowed within the strictly regimented protocol of the Pritikin Diet.

Though thousands of miles apart on different coasts of the United States, we independently came to the same conclusion: Both the Atkins and Pritikin diets—and the countless other popular diets that millions of Americans follow—were missing the critical components for long-term success. They were hard to sustain, and almost impossible to adopt as a daily way of eating. Yes, they promised impressive short-term results, but neither diet offered any long-term, sustainable results. Neither Atkins nor Pritikin, we realized, was enough to help people lose weight, keep it off, and remain healthy for the rest of their lives.

The Atkins Diet, for instance, featured foods with ample amounts of protein and fat, while limiting foods with refined carbohydrates in order to keep the glycemic load low. (We’ll explain later why properly identifying refined carbs and glycemic load—not glycemic index—is crucial to your success.) But the diet was deficient in fiber and certain nutrients, such as anti-aging plant pigments like carotenoids and flavonoids, and disease-fighting vitamins and minerals, including vitamins C and K, as well as magnesium and potassium. These are all necessary for optimal health. Atkins also featured foods with potentially high amounts of factory-farmed beef, pork, and poultry and mass-produced dairy products—all of which are likely to be contaminated with toxic hormones, pesticides, and chemicals.

Though neither plan was ideal, they were still vast improvements over the way most Americans were eating by the 1970s. By then, we were wrongly blaming fat for all our health woes, from heart disease to cancer. The Pritikin and Atkins diets, as well as many other well-known weight-loss programs, were finding a ready audience among increasing numbers of people who were desperate to lose weight and regain their health. Though the dietary solutions to this crisis varied dramatically, the crisis was caused by one problem: the Standard American Diet (or, fittingly, SAD), which took hold after we banished healthy smart fats.

The SAD actually featured the worst of Atkins (processed protein) and the worst of Pritikin (insufficient healthy fats and protein), combined with a heaping side of refined carbohydrates and processed convenience foods, prepared with so-called heart-healthy vegetable oils and deadly, artificial trans fats, used in shelf-stable convenience foods and fast foods. A day’s eating might include sugary cereal, toast slathered with trans fat–packed margarine, and juice for breakfast; a sandwich of processed deli meats for lunch (plus fries or chips and a package of cookies for dessert); more processed meat for dinner (or frozen fish sticks)—and maybe, just maybe, a tiny portion of vegetables, like ketchup.

Another starring component of the SAD besides processed foods and dumb fats was sugar—lots and lots of sugar, in many different forms and from many different sources: from the usual suspects like candy, soda, and artificially sweetened drinks, and from packaged cookies, crackers, pretzels, chips, muffins, and other commercially manufactured baked goods—many of them made with high-fructose corn syrup. But these were just the obvious ones. The very basis of the SAD was large servings of starchy carbohydrates that quickly convert to sugar in the body—foods like pasta, white rice and bread, and healthy items like sweetened fat-free yogurt and granola bars. From your body’s point of view, you might as well have swallowed the entire sugar bowl.

Now, after decades of the SAD, and fruitlessly searching for magic-bullet diets that we can use to eat ourselves out of being sicker and fatter, here is what we’ve wrought:

Heart disease is still the No. 1 killer in our country, claiming more than six hundred thousand lives a year in the United States.

Fifty-nine percent of Americans are actively trying to lose weight every year, but only 5 to 10 percent manage to keep weight off. More than a third of our population is obese.

Diabetes and its many complications have ruined the lives of millions, including children.

Metabolic Syndrome, or prediabetes—a lethal combination of risk factors for heart disease and diabetes (which we’ll explore in detail in Chapter 4)—is on track to become the Black Plague of the twenty-first century. One out of three people have it.

Rates of Alzheimer’s disease are climbing, and not just because of better diagnosis. Alzheimer’s shares deep metabolic roots with the top three diet-related chronic illnesses: diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.

We followed the experts’ advice and cut the fat out, thinking we’d get leaner and healthier. But when we replaced the good foods with bad ones, we took a turn for the worse. So, how can we get—and stay—healthy? After years of working with two popular diets, and closely observing what worked—and more importantly, what didn’t—we’ve found the answer.

The optimal eating plan, we’ve both concluded, features high levels of beneficial fat and fiber and the right amount of clean protein for weight loss—all bound together with delicious, healthful flavor and ample nutrients. That’s the Smart Fat Solution. And here’s what it looks like.

Fat

The type of fat we’re advocating—smart fat—has two amazing properties, both of which contribute to effective weight loss and long-term good health.

First, smart fat alters your hormonal balance so that you feel more energetic and less hungry while you burn more calories. And second, smart fat lowers your levels of inflammation, which benefits nearly every aspect of your health.

In later chapters, we’ll explain these two concepts in greater detail, but for now, we want you to know that when you seek out smart fats and combine them with fiber, protein, and flavor, you’ll have a powerful weight-management tool that you can use for life. As a result, you’ll feel healthy and energetic. What you won’t feel is deprived.

Protein

The ideal diet has to have just the right amount of protein. This is particularly true when you’re trying to lose weight, because protein helps you feel full and helps the body burn calories more efficiently. Before we tell you about quantity, that is, how much protein you should consume, we first want to emphasize the quality of protein.

When it comes to protein, quality almost always trumps quantity. You will not lose weight (and be truly healthy) unless you choose clean protein—we’re talking organic plant protein, such as soy, beans, and protein powders; or animal protein that is organic, wild-caught, grass-fed, free-range, or pasture-raised, all of which are low in inflammatory omega-6 fatty acids. Such sources of clean protein are great for you, unlike sources of mean protein, which in the case of animals means grain-fed and factory-farmed. Mean protein leads to inflammation, which makes us sick and fat—the opposite of what clean protein can do for us. Remember this shorthand: Always choose protein that’s clean, not mean. (And after we explain why, we’ll teach you how to do this.)

SMART MOVE: QUICK-START YOUR SMART FAT SOLUTION

Here’s a small step to help you shift your mindset as you begin this book. For now, simply remember the key ingredients in the Smart Fat Solution when you prepare a meal or want a snack: fat, protein, fiber, and flavor. You don’t need to be rigid about combining all four ingredients every time you eat, but aim to get fat, protein, fiber, and flavor into your diet every day.

Maybe you don’t have a ripe avocado, or you don’t particularly want one. Wild-caught salmon (clean protein) instead of chicken pairs nicely with the chickpea salad, and because the salmon contains omega-3 fatty acids—one of the smartest fats you can consume—you’d be combining in one food a smart fat and a clean protein. Or, how about some grass-fed beef—which in addition to being a clean protein also contains omega-3s—combined with flavorful white beans and fresh sage and garlic?

Looking for a healthy snack? Try some almonds and a bit of dark chocolate for a nutrient-packed handful of flavor, fiber, and smart fat.

As you work through this book, you’ll begin to learn more about how to put together meals and snacks with these principles—fat, protein, fiber, and flavor—in mind. You’ll also learn to swap out ingredients to achieve a balance and flavor profile that most appeal to you. It’s easy—and best of all, it’s delicious. Once you start, you’ll want to smart-fat all your food—for life!

Fiber

Fiber makes you feel full and satisfied, which sets you up for successful weight loss. Eat fiber to shed pounds, lower your blood sugar levels and blood pressure, and improve your cholesterol profile. When you combine fiber with smart fat and protein, you’ll reach your weight-loss goals and lower your risk for developing many diseases.

Flavor

Believe it or not, weight loss and good food are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they’re complementary. You’re more likely to stick with a way of eating if you love the way your food tastes. That’s right, appealing flavors are the key to weight-loss success, and—even better—excellent flavor also means great nutrition.

Herbs, spices, and condiments are like a natural medicine cabinet full of phytochemicals (living plant compounds) loaded with anti-aging and anti-inflammatory properties. A major part of creating flavor is how we prepare food. Marinating and grilling and other simple cooking techniques (as we’ll explain later) not only enhance the flavor of your meals, but protect their nutritional value.

Putting It All Together: How to Use This Book

The Smart Fat Solution will challenge your long-held attitudes about dietary fat. In fact, it may just change your attitude about diet and food in general. We’ll give you guidance on what and how to eat—with lists of fat, fiber, and protein foods; meal plans; recipes; and more—but before you get to the specifics, we want you to understand why you should eat the smart fat way.

In the next chapter, we share a lot more about smart fats—why they’re the key to weight loss and good health; where to find them; and why adding fiber, clean protein, and flavor to your diet is a must. We also tell you how to start incorporating smart fats into your daily diet. Over the course of this book, you’ll learn what foods to eat and which ones to stay away from—and why. You’ll also learn how to make sense of the sometimes confusing nutritional information about fat, carbs, and protein.

After we give you a foundation for how and why smart fats work, we get down to details with our fat-fiber-protein guidelines; lists of foods and ingredients; a two-phase, thirty-day eating plan; and more than fifty go-to recipes. Along the way, you’ll get advice on serving sizes, tips on shopping and cooking, and loads of practical information to keep you on the smart fat track, during and after the Thirty-Day Plan. Best of all, you’ll see how simple it is to smart-fat all your food (without a recipe): breakfast, lunch, and dinner; your restaurant selections; your family’s dinner; your traditional holiday meal; your lunch box; and much more.

You won’t have to count calories, grams, and percentages, though we provide those numbers for people who want to know them. (And your family and friends will want to know—you’re going to look and feel better than ever, so they’re going to wonder what you’re doing differently!) Once you’ve got a handle on how to smart-fat your food for life, you won’t even need recipes because it will all become second nature. Finally, we go beyond diet and help you make lifestyle adjustments—exercise, stress management, better sleep—that go hand in hand with lasting weight loss and excellent health.

CHAPTER 2

Why the Smart Fat Solution Will Make You Lean and Healthy

FAT, FIBER, AND PROTEIN, served up with flavor—together, they’re a powerful, natural prescription for weight loss and wellness. Now let’s take a good look at each of these aspects of the Smart Fat Solution so you can better understand the role they play in controlling your weight, staying lean and trim, improving your health—and saving your life.

Smart Fats at Work

Fat can make you thin, and controlling your weight will keep you healthy. Behind this simple truth are some complex (biochemical) realities, but don’t worry—we’re here to make them understandable.

If you don’t need to shed excess weight, congrats; you’ll still reap many benefits from the Smart Fat Solution, including a reduction in the risk of various illnesses. The Smart Fat Solution will help you turn back the clock on aging. Whatever your goals, there are two big physiological reasons why adding smart fat to your diet will yield the results you want:

1.Smart fats decrease inflammation. Inflammation is the basis for virtually every degenerative disease and is a huge roadblock when it comes to permanent weight loss.

2.Smart fats balance your hormones. If your hormones are out of whack, it’s next to impossible to lose weight or to be truly healthy.

When most of us think of inflammation (Latin inflammato; literally, I ignite), we picture an angry-looking rash or the swelling around a joint. Got an abscess in your tooth? An eruption on your skin? An aching back? It’s inflammation—at least the kind most of us are familiar with.

Inflammation is the body’s response to injury (the throbbing of your sprained ankle that blew up like a balloon) or to infection (the puffy, itching skin around your scraped knee). Your body correctly perceives that it’s under attack, and in an attempt to control the damage, the immune system mounts a counterattack. If you get a splinter, the body sends fluid to the affected area, surrounding it with white blood cells to prevent microbes from invading and starting an infection. The neighboring vascular tissue goes into overdrive, trying to protect the body by kicking out the enemy—everything from bacteria to damaged cells.

This particular variety of inflammation is called acute inflammation. We’re all familiar with acute inflammation because it’s annoyingly painful and impossible to ignore. But the kind of inflammation we’re talking about here is very different. The potentially lethal kind of inflammation that causes or promotes every degenerative disease known to humans is a completely different animal. This much more dangerous kind of inflammation is called chronic inflammation, and though it does incalculable damage to our bodies over the course of our lives, it exists largely below our pain threshold.

Like high blood pressure and diabetes, chronic inflammation has no visible symptoms (though it can be measured by a lab test known as high-sensitivity C-reactive protein [hs CRP]). But it damages the vascular system, the organs, the brain, and body tissues. It slowly erodes your health, gradually overwhelming the body’s anti-inflammatory defenses. It causes heart disease. It causes cognitive decline and memory loss. Even obesity and diabetes are linked to inflammation because fat cells are veritable factories for inflammatory chemicals. In fact, it’s likely that inflammation is the key link between obesity and all the diseases obesity puts you at risk for developing.

When your joints are chronically inflamed, degenerative diseases like arthritis are right around the corner. Inflamed lungs cause asthma and other respiratory illnesses. Inflammation in the brain is linked to Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological conditions, including brain fog and everyday memory lapses that we write off as normal aging—except those memory lapses are not an inevitable consequence of aging at all. They are, however, an inevitable consequence of inflammation, because inflammation sets your brain on fire. Those I forgot where I parked the car moments start happening more frequently, and occurring prematurely.

Inflamed arteries can signal the onset of heart disease. Chronic inflammation has also been linked to various forms of cancer; it triggers harmful changes on a molecular level that result in the growth of cancer cells. Inflammation is so central to the process of aging and breakdown at the cellular level that some health pundits have begun referring to the phenomena as inflam-aging. That’s because inflammation accelerates aging, including the visible signs of aging we all see in the skin.

In addition to making us sick, chronic inflammation can make permanent weight loss fiendishly difficult. The fat cells keep churning out inflammatory proteins called cytokines, promoting even more inflammation. That inflammation in turn prevents the energy-making structures in the cells, called mitochondria, from doing their jobs efficiently, much like a heat wave would affect the output of a factory that lacks air-conditioning—productivity declines under extreme conditions. One of the duties of the mitochondria is burning fat; inflammation interferes with the job of the mitochondria, making fat burning more difficult and fat loss nearly impossible.

While someone trying to lose weight may initially be successful, after a while, the number on the scale gets stuck. The much-discussed weight-loss plateau is often a result of this cycle of inflammation and fat storage. And here’s even more bad news: Adding more exercise or eating fewer calories in an attempt to break through the plateau will have some effect on weight loss, but not much. And continuing to lose weight becomes much harder to accomplish. Why? Because inflammation decreases our normal ability to burn calories. (We’ll tell you more about other factors that contribute to the plateau—and how the Smart Fat Solution can help you to move beyond them—in Part 2 of this book.)

Remember, some inflammation is a good thing; it’s part of the body’s natural healing response, and it helps